Jay Kasturi Poems

All poetry is exaggeration,
as youth is, saying things
with uncommon words.
Words stain what we hear,
...

The stars surface above the hills as if from a darkening
Polaroid negative,
The last bird has reached home – purple glow, in Bengal,
it is the cow-dust time.
...

Route 23, Butler, New Jersey,5: 30 P.M.,
traffic barely moving,
ahead, a redhead in a Jetta,
in end-of-the-day abandon,
...

Between the taxicab’s window rolling down an inch
and the beggar’s hand darting in
is fraction of a second,
an infinity of misery.
...

Dropping a fistful of earth
on your cold body in a pit,
changes nothing.
Fistful after fistful,
...

I shall hold on to my piece of the bone,
knuckle bone, they say;
you hold on to yours.
Interlocking symbols
...

Thus she was taken away from me,
snatched in ultimate violation,
under a white cotton sheet.
Taken away the years, the moon,
...

Two horns follow an oboe’s gait
in single-minded trance,
not minding the clarinet's caution
and the piccolo's feigned passion
...

Omne animal triste post coitum-
resigned recapitulation, yet some like the spider
in estrus-planned compulsion
will eat her duty-bound mate.
...

Does the one-legged trance of a crane
long for two-legged bliss,
does one hand clapping, in beating the wind,
mourn for its companion?
...